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Cake day: June 3rd, 2026

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  • Right wing authoritarianism has nothing to do with the US political divide. It is called that because the French parliament back in the day had the monarchists/authoritarians sitting on the right side of parliament, while the liberals/anti-authoritarians sat on the left side of parliament. Many communists are right wing authoritarians.

    One trait of high authoritarian people is the capacity for cognitive dissonance. This can be accomplished in many ways. I know, for example, that your definition of “mass democratization” is very different from what I would consider mass democratization. You have clarified this when defending North Korea.

    The concept isn’t very muddy at all. It’s not even necessarily a bad thing to be authoritarian. However, highly authoritarian people often do not like being known as such. Interestingly, they would like to be seen as average authoritarian, while both medium and low authoritarian people think that being low authoritarian is best.




  • Interesting read, thanks.

    @[email protected]

    Hey, here’s a textbook example of the second bullet point I listed above: aggressive defense of what are considered the established authorities.

    I provided reading on the psychological profile of an authoritarian individual, whether they be followers or leaders. Cow here immediately jumped in with an essay critiquing Arendt, who is neither here nor there. Matter of fact, Altemeyer focuses on Canadian and American authoritarians, because he was a Canadian psychologist. I don’t think he even mentions the Soviet union once in his book.

    I don’t know if cow here even took the time to understand that I was talking about individual psychology before defending the state. Aggressive defense of established authority.








  • The reality is that stopping the genocide is not possible right now. That is why the GOP picked that as the culture war talking point: it’s a situation where there is no winning scenario for Democrats, and they can either call them the genocide party or the hitler party.

    The options are: less genocide (Democrats) or more genocide (Republicans). Refusing to vote for less genocide because they’re pro-genocide just means that the more genocide side wins. And that’s what happened. And that’s why Israel is now actively pursuing the greater Israel project, because they know the GOP is fully on board with it.

    And now the measurably worse outcome for both Americans and Palestine has taken place as a result.